American branches of Google and Amazon were the scene of organized protests against a weapons project that Google and Amazon are carrying out together with the Israeli government, among others. The approximately $1.2 billionProject Nimbusgives Israeli armed forces access to advanced AI technologies, for example for facial recognition, video or sentiment analysis. Opponents of the project fear that these technologies could be misused in the context of the conflict in the Middle East.

“The protests misrepresent Project Nimbus. Google Cloud is proud to support several governments, including Israel. Our work is not directly related to highly sensitive or classified military workloads,” quotes the US portal “Wired” Google Cloud spokesperson Atle Erlingsson in an email. Amazon has so far not responded to the events.

Loud protests from its employees against weapons projects are nothing new for Google: as early as 2018, there was massive resistance from staff against “Project Maven” – an initiative aimed at developing drones for military purposes. Google withdrew after internal petitions back from the project and published its AI principles, which excludes the use of the technology for military purposes. Quite a few employees see Project Nimbus as a violation of these self-imposed guidelines, especially the trade union organization “Alphabet Workers Union”, which was responsible for the protests in 2018:

We’re in San Francisco, about to get our #NoTechforApartheid demonstration, with dozens including tech workers from Google and Amazon protesting the Project Nimbus contract with Israel.

We are even here as colonialism tries to reclaim this victory this morning.

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— Alphabet Workers Union (AWU-CWA) (@AlphabetWorkers) September 8, 2022

Google itself had already tried to counter the growing resistance at the end of 2021: Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian published a blog post, in which he provides insight into Google Cloud’s partnership with the US government and emphasizes that the company’s technologies are being used in a way that does not violate AI guidelines. Apparently, not only many employees, but also some shareholders see things differently: As early as May 2022, shareholders of Google and Amazon had opposed “Project Nimbus” and tried to rethink the companies – without success.

In the course of the protest against Amazon and Google’s armaments project, the ex-Google product manager has also moved Ariel Koren in the spotlight. According to her own statements, she was pressured by the search engine giant’s management after she made public her opposition to “Project Nimbus” and has since resigned from her job at Google. She continues to support the protests against the multi-billion dollar project under the hashtag #NoTechForApartheid:

Another day, another @Amazon workers speak out against Project Nimbus! ???????? #NoTechForApartheid https://t.co/CrHR27JDOG

— Ariel Koren (@ariel_koko) September 10, 2022

(FM)